Peggy went up to the piano, which was open, and struck two or three resonant chords. "Certainly there is something in that," she said musingly.
"Yes, madame," Pauline replied, "he is a man, and you are proud of him. He is so different from all the others."
Peggy's idle fingers rattled out a little trilling catch from the Chanson Florian. Suddenly she stopped and turned her head swiftly. "You do not like Mr. Collingwood?" she asked, watching Pauline's face intently.
"Ma Doue!" Pauline answered in her native Breton, "but I like M. Collingwood well enough. All the women that there are like M. Collingwood. He is a terrible flirt, but he is not wicked. But madame must be careful, that is all. He loves madame not as he loves the others."
Peggy closed the lid of the piano with a bang. "Now, Pauline," she said, "don't be silly. Off you go to bed. I feel ever so much better now."
The maid gathered up the brushes and the bottle of eau-de-cologne from the table and took them into Mrs. Admaston's room. Then she returned. "Good night, madame," she said. "If you want me, that little bell there rings in my room. Boone nuit. Dormez bien, chèrie."
She kissed her mistress and left the room.
Mrs. Admaston pulled aside the long curtains of green silk. She turned the oblong handle which released two of the windows, pulled it towards her, and drank in the fresh night air.
How fragrant and stimulating it was. How pure, and how different from the horrid, scented air of the sitting-room!
"'From the cool cisterns of the midnight air my spirit drinks repose,'" Peggy quoted to herself; and she did, indeed, seem to be bathed by a sweet and delicate refreshment, a cleansing, reviving air, which washed all hot and feverish thoughts away and made her one with the stainless spirit of the night.
The black masses--the black, blotted masses--of the trees in the Tuileries gardens cut into the sky-line. But even now, late as it was, innumerable lights twinkled over Paris, and a big honey-coloured moon, which shamed the firefly lights below, and seemed almost like a harvest moon, had risen and was staring down upon the City of Pleasure.
In front of the window was a balcony, and, lightly clad as she was, the girl went out upon it and with an impulsive gesture stretched out her arms to where the Lamp of the night, depended from a little drift of fleecy-white and amber-coloured clouds, swung over Paris.